“Are you guys doing one thing?” Taylor Swift requested the members of *NSYNC on Sept. 12 whereas onstage on the MTV Video Music Awards, the place the reunited boy band had simply arrived to shrieks and offered Swift the very best pop trophy. “I have to know what it’s!” *NSYNC was again, and even pop’s greatest famous person was amped.
Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick and Joey Fatone demurred on the time, however quickly after the VMAs, *NSYNC introduced “Higher Place,” its first new music collectively in over twenty years. The shimmering, falsetto-heavy disco-pop observe was created for Trolls Band Collectively, the third installment within the hit animated movie collection during which Timberlake voices a important character, Department, and has contributed hits to every of the primary two Trolls motion pictures.
“My pleasure began means again within the early a part of the 12 months,” says Gina Shay, the producer/music supervisor for the movies. That was when Timberlake despatched her a demo of “Higher Place,” designed to comply with his Billboard Sizzling 100-topping smash “Can’t Cease the Feeling!” from the unique Trolls movie in 2016 and his SZA collaboration, “The Different Facet,” from 2020’s Trolls World Tour.
Shortly after sending the demo, Timberlake texted Shay that he felt impressed to reunite *NSYNC to document “Higher Place.” “It was like dynamite was going off inside my mind,” Shay says. In any case, *NSYNC — whose 4 studio albums have offered 27.9 million copies, in response to Luminate, and scored turn-of-the-century smashes like “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” — hadn’t launched music collectively since 2002.
And whereas Trolls Band Collectively focuses on a boy band reunion, Shay says that the plot had been locked in lengthy earlier than any speak of an *NSYNC comeback. “The film’s story has been strong for about 4 years,” she says, “so it was simply that good confluence of a music to reunite *NSYNC and to hold the narrative.”
Though Shay says that coordinating all 5 members’ schedules with their particular person groups “took a little bit time to kind by,” “Higher Place” got here collectively somewhat seamlessly as soon as the quintet was totally on board. After *NSYNC introduced its reunion on the VMAs and unveiled “Higher Place” on Sept. 29, Shay hopes that the music will change into ubiquitous previous to the Nov. 17 launch of Trolls Band Collectively — however nonetheless excessive it climbs, she’s glad that the movie franchise might play a task within the reformation of a pop behemoth like *NSYNC.
“I’m so glad we have been in a position to do that for the followers,” she says. “It has been a mixture of love, pandemonium and need success.”
This story initially appeared within the Oct. 7, 2023, difficulty of Billboard.
